Pun Salad

It's an excellent, important work by University of Virginia psych prof Jonathan Haidt. And I don't think I've said this about any book before: you should read it. Not "you should read it if you're interested in moral psychology." Not "you should read it if you're interested in how psychology interacts with politics."

No, you should read this book if you're a human being. Just that simple. It's accessible, funny in spots, and well-written.

By coincidence, I read The Righteous Mind in parallel with Charles Murray's Coming Apart, discussed below; this turned out to have a certain degree of synergy, as observations from one book provided insights into the other. That's also a good idea, if you can manage it.

Haidt's subtitle is: "Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion". Why indeed? We're all human beings, roughly in the same environment, equipped with the same mental hardware, confronted with roughly the same problems. What's the deal with not getting along? (The first line in the Introduction quotes Rodney King from 1992: "Can we all get along?") The book is a sequel of sorts to The Happiness Hypothesis which I read back in 2007; it stands well on its own, though.

The first part of the book continues a metaphor Haidt developed in that previous book: "The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant." We would like to think that our moral sense is based in rationality; in fact, we habitually make moral judgments based on our intuitions (that's the "elephant") and "rationally" justify those judgments (as "rider") after the fact.

In the second part of the book, Haidt looks at the the moral "taste buds" that govern our moral sense. He enumerates six good/evil pairs: Care/Harm; Liberty/Oppression; Fairness/Cheating; Loyalty/Betrayal; Authority/Subversion; and Sanctity/Degradation. Not everyone "fires" on all six pairs; in fact, Haidt's key insight is that this is how liberals and conservatives differ: liberals tend to view things on the first two keys, while conservatives weigh in on all six. (And libertarians bring in another taste arrangement.)

The book's third part concerns the old individualist/collectivist dichotomy. Haidt's metaphor here: we're 90% "chimp" (rugged selfish individuals), and 10% "bee" (collectivistic sacrificers to the group.) Deny either side at your peril.

A significant part of the charm of the book is that it's very much a story of Haidt's intellectual odyssey, and how (as a self-described Jewish atheist liberal Democrat) he gradually began to understand (if not necessarily agree with) the conservative moral outlook. (Conversely, I found myself with a deeper insight into the liberal mind.) The old saw about liberals thinking that conservatives are evil, while conservatives simply think that liberals are stupid? That makes a lot more sense now.

I can't really do the book justice here. Once again, I encourage you to read it yourself.